Hello everyone, this post is going on the theology blog because it has to do with ethics, but it is possible that it belongs on my regular blog. The topic has to do with plagiarism, and people who sanctimoniously make too big of a deal about it when it happens in minor instances.
There is a quote about great artists "stealing," and I always thought actually using that as a creative lifestyle is really too much in the direction of accepting dishonesty. But there is another extreme where people think if you borrow a line or phrase once in a blue moon, even accidentally, then you deserve the equivalent of getting kicked out of Harvard, or not having any career or even hobby at all. A flicker of someone else's style that they happened upon sooner is regarded as serving raw chicken in a restaurant.
Well raw chicken can kill people, but frankly, integrating some idea you heard into a rambling work of literature that weaves ten thousand thoughts in an artful and original way, doesn't really hurt anyone that much. It doesn't. You want to say it does, but it doesn't. And the reason you think it does is that you don't really know what an idea feels like.
I could sense the snootiness during the conspiracy when I accidentally repeated a joke about hump day on my blog, and when I agonized over keeping or tossing a poem that felt too familiar to me. It was christians who wanted to believe that I was a liar and a cheater. And I simply am not. And why do I have to live under that scrutiny? Does it help me? Is it team work? No. It is an accusation from Satan, and the people who do it make that mistake because they don't really participate at all in any idea economy. They are looking for sins and have no bank of their own creativity. Their thought life is a constant tally and evaluation of petty, small time virtue and vice, and the world of actual stories and jokes is foreign to their minds. So they wait on a perch for me to have a faulty blip in a life of creative service and sacrifice. And while the actual content of anyone's forty volumes of work looks like complete gibberish to them, they can, in fact, understand a cheap headline defaming a true writer as a cheat and fraud. It is easier to believe that then face the fact that their whole career is built on a few thoughts they had after sermons at an ignorant church.
You're just not my friends. You're okay with me writing for twenty years without an audience, salary, or any justice whatsoever, but if I name a mouse character a name that you heard of in a movie, then you think you deserve a worldwide audience to hear you call me a religious hypocrit. You think I should have said more about Trump, which is the only topic you could think of, but I lost five careers before you even learned how quotation marks work. Well here is some plagiarism for you: all the real artists agree with me and would say the same thing.
That was a good ending, but I need to add one more thought, which is that ironically, over-accusing people of copying your work is a form of stealing credit for their whole career. Just a little hint of suspicion from a more powerful platform can make people think that a very creative person must have stolen all their ideas, and from who? you, of course. But that is where the sneakier and snakier intellectual property theft is. It is so much lazier than failing to google a title you think of. Just sit back and let them write a whole book that you can later suggest was all from you. Maybe I even hacked into your computer. That would be a good story, wouldn't it? Let's see, that brings your total to one story. And for your finale, you can say I copied this defense as well.
